10 of the Most Important Modern Documentaries

5. The Imposter

Some things are too good to be true. Other things are so absurdly farfetched that it takes a 2-hour film to convince you that they even happened. Enter The Imposter. Bart Layton’s 2012 tale is so tall that it could see anyone’s house from anywhere, but amazingly it all happened exactly as it’s recounted (apart from all the speculative stuff near the end). In 1994 a 13-year-old boy named Nicholas Barclay went out to play basketball and never came back. 3 years later, after the search had all but been abandoned, he reappeared in Spain, allegedly having escaped from a child sex ring.

The thing is though, he looked very, very different. His eyes were the wrong colour and his accent had acquired a heavy French lilt. As you might have guessed, it wasn’t Nicholas at all, it was a con-artist named Frédéric Bourdin, a man who had made his name impersonating missing children due to his short stature, tone of voice and aptitude for sleuthing. He stayed with the family for almost a year before getting rumbled by a private investigator. The thing is though, Bourdin had his own suspicions. How could this family possibly believe he was really Nicholas? Unless something far darker was going on, unless they wanted people to believe he’d been found. Through a series of interviews with Bourdin, the family and others, a dark, fascinating web of dishonesty, double-dealing and delusion emerges that hasn’t been unraveled even to this day. It’s a disturbing, fascinating insight into the bizarre things that happen in small-town America.

 

4. The House I Live In

In the 1970s numerous criminologists predicted that the prison system had a life expectancy of 30 years or less. Today, not only is it still here, it’s bigger than ever and nowhere is that more true than in the USA. Roughly 750 people per 100,000 are incarcerated there, more than any other nation on the planet and a large quotient of that is down to the drug war. Directed by Eugene Jarecki, the film explores the history and context of US drug policy in excruciating detail, unearthing stories and statistics that will horrify you.

This isn’t a film that beats around the bush, Jarecki comments very directly on the redundancy of the ‘War on Drugs’ model and the film is full of interviews with other staunch critics of the system, such as creator of The Wire David Simon and Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow. The most galling portion of the film comes from the time spent with people caught right in the middle though, examples include a corner dealer who feels like she has no other options, a victim of the wildly disproportionate sentencing system for crack cocaine and a man facing a life without parole sentence for a possession charge (his first). This is the kind of film that galvanizes, sickens and energizes and I doubt I or anyone who has seen it will ever forget it.

 

3. Utopia

Speaking of which, John Pilger’s Utopia can make the same claim and then some. The difference is, in this case I was also deeply ashamed at how little I had known going in. Utopia is an examination of the past and ongoing treatment of the Aboriginal people by the Australian government, from early colonization, through the stolen generation and right up to now. It’s an ugly, shameful chronicle that leaves no stone unturned. It centers on an Aboriginal reserve that is literally called Utopia as you might expect, it’s anything but. You cynic, you.

Pilger has always kind of been a thorn in the side of the Aussie government and this is him at his thorniest, unearthing cooked figures, cover ups and damning evidence that suggests that rather than being a disturbing relic of a past era, the stolen generation is actually still happening. The most uneasy portion of the film comes when Pilger visits a luxury hotel which used to effectively serve as a concentration camp. As he stands in one of the deluxe rooms, a guide explains that it used to house dozens of people, packed in like sardines. Elsewhere the film sheds light on the relationship between Aboriginal Australians and the government, revealing that no treaty has ever been signed and hitting us with some shocking information about the diseases that blight much of their populous due to the squalid environments in which many of them live. It’s a difficult watch, but an important one.

2. Chasing Ice

Is it unreasonable to want to be awestruck and depressed at the same time? We may never know, but for those who hope the answer is no, there’s always Chasing Ice (or skydiving whilst listening to Nick Cave). The film follows the efforts of environmental photographer James Balog to raise awareness about climate change by capturing footage of glacier movement. The footage itself is breathtaking, you see time-lapses, aerial shots and one sequence of a section of glacier breaking apart that will dislocate your jaw. Balog takes extraordinary risks to film it all, traveling through environments that treat humanity like decidedly unwelcome guests.

Through all the awe and daring do, you are never allowed to forget why Balog and his team are there and what they hope to convey. The evidence of the impact of climate change presented in Chasing Ice is nothing short of damning, entire landscapes have vanished in a matter of years and the intimacy of the film’s style makes all of it feel that much closer to home. The film crew risked their lives to tell this story and they demand your attention.

 

1. The Act of Killing

Most of us will never know what it is to take a life or even witness a life being taken. We can read about murders, wars and regimes, see the footage and hear the testimonials but getting inside the minds of the people involved is another matter. Joshua Oppenheimer gave us perhaps the clearest insight into the world when he made The Act of Killing. In Indonesia in 1965 a communist movement attempt to stage a coup and thus overthrow the reigning militaristic regime under Sukarno. It failed, an in retaliation, more than 500,000 suspected communists were murdered in less than a year.

Oppenheimer and his crew focus their story not on the families of the victims, governmental figures or journalists but on the men who did the killing, none of whom have ever faced any kind of trial and largely live comfortable, happy lives. Oppenheimer doesn’t confront them with the morality of their past actions directly, rather, he tasks them with writing and shooting a film that recreates all the things that they did during this time. The results are bone-chilling. Seeing someone speak, with a kind of wistful nostalgia, about strangling a man with a length of metal wire is a very difficult thing to process on an emotional level. Anwar Congo is given the central role in the film, since he was one of the most infamous members of this death squad, claiming to have killed around 100o people. Him and his friends choose to recreate many of the stories in ways stylistically similar to their favourite films, like westerns and gangster movies.

Not until the end of the film do any of these men show even the slightest glimmer of regret, but when it does appear it’s every bit as disturbing as all the reverence had been. Several Indonesian crew members appear simply as ‘Anonymous’ in the film’s credits, presumably because they are living in fear of violent retribution from the old death squad. The Act of Killing is important because it sheds light on one of the worst mass-murders in human history, but more than that, it frames it in a way that faces us with the extremes of human malice, it is as significant as a psychological study as it is as a film.